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16 Sep Louise O’Shea Attempting to explain and understand the many forms of oppression that exist in society without reference to the nature of the capitalist system is a sure path to answers that don’t answer and explanations that don’t explain. Individual prejudice, lack of education or ill-advised public po...CONTINUE READING

02 Sep Jane Kenway Elite private schools have always been involved in the making of class. They do “class work” on behalf of their usually wealthy, well-connected clients, patrons and advocates by reproducing their privilege, power and status over the generations. Such schools are immersed in extensive netwo...CONTINUE READING

02 Sep Leela Yellesetty We live in a world of unprecedented inequality. Currently, the world’s richest 62 people possess as much wealth as the bottom one-half of humanity. By any conceivable measure – income, wealth, health care, education, housing – the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us is astronom...CONTINUE READING

19 Aug Josh Lees Marx and Engels famously wrote in The Communist Manifesto : “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. They paved the way in arguing that in order to understand any society, we need to begin by stripping away all the ideological fluff and getting to t...CONTINUE READING

05 Aug Ben Hillier Why read the Communist Manifesto of 1848? It was written 30 years before the invention of the telephone, at a time when half of English children didn’t live to see their fifth birthday. The pamphlet was commissioned as a political program for the Communist League – an organisation of sever...CONTINUE READING

05 Aug Tom Bramble The barbarism at the Don Dale youth detention centre in Darwin revealed by ABC’s Four Corners in late July is only the latest example in the long-running history of brutalism carried out by state authorities in Australia. Most obviously, this brutalism was visited upon the Aboriginal popul...CONTINUE READING

25 Jul James Plested Reading the personal accounts of soldiers from the World War I Battle of the Somme, you’re struck by the strange matter-of-factness and lack of emotion. In the face of such extreme and senseless violence, words do fail. In the diary of Walter Hutchinson, a British stretcher-bearer, we read...CONTINUE READING

07 Jul Vashti Kenway The murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a British fascist, the prominence of the far right in the campaign for Brexit, the dramatic rise of extreme nationalist forces across Europe and the increased prominence of organisations like the United Patriots Front in Australia all raise the question of...CONTINUE READING

27 Jun Mick Armstrong The latest opinion polls show record levels of support for minor parties and independent candidates – almost 30 per cent in the House of Representatives and undoubtedly considerably more in the Senate. This is but one reflection of the widespread disillusionment with both major parties, mo...CONTINUE READING